Iconoclast

Rebel in Evening Clothes

Immortalized for her cocktail-swilling Algonquin reign, Vanity Fair writer Dorothy Parker also used her wit to skewer prejudice in pre-civil-rights America. And despite the original objections of Lillian Hellman, her onetime literary executor, Parker's final legacy—to Martin Luther King and the N.A.A.C.P.—is still being affirmed.

In the fall of 1914, as Europe was marching over the precipice, Miss Dorothy Rothschild of New York wrote a poem entitled "Any Porch," and sent it off to Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield. It was a nine-stanza lampoon, satirizing the hotel-porch babble of spoiled upper-crust ladies in Connecticut, and its acceptance, for an emolument of $12, marked the first time that the future Dorothy Parker got anything into print:

Dorothy Parker. From Culver Pictures.

"My husband says, often, 'Elise,

You feel things too deeply, you do—'"

"Yes, forty a month, if you please,

Oh, servants impose on me, too."

"I don't want the vote for myself,

But women with property, dear—"

"I think the poor girl's on the shelf,

She's talking about her 'career.'"

Crowninshield—the granduncle of Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, late of The Washington Post—soon after hired Miss Rothschild for Condé Nast and thereby enabled her to quit her day job as a pianist at a Manhattan dance school. This was an odd alliance, between the cultivated and immaculate super-Wasp Crowninshield, who combined fashion-plate tastes with an interest in Picasso, and the daughter of an ambitious sweatshop artist in the New York Garment District. From then on, young Dorothy divided her time agreeably enough between writing suggestive fashion captions for Vogue and incendiary verses for Vanity Fair. The fashion lines had an edge to them—"Brevity is the soul of lingerie," she wrote, and also: "There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace."

This sort of thing was a revenge for the detested convent school to which her upwardly mobile parents had insisted upon sending her. The poetry, though, was sometimes so subversive that Mr. Crowninshield had to publish it under the pseudonym "Henriette Rousseau." Composed in free verse rather than conventional stanzas, they included "Women: A Hate Song" ("I hate Women. They get on my Nerves"). There was also a pungent prose article, "Why I Haven't Married," in which it was the turn of the male sex to get the treatment. There was another poem with the "Hate Song" title, from 1919, subtitled "An Intimate Glimpse of Vanity Fair—En Famille." (You can read it here.) It began and ended with the italicized cry "I hate the office; / It cuts in on my social life." Here one encountered such figures as:

… the Boss;

The Great White Chief.

He made us what we are to-day,—

I hope he's satisfied.

He has some bizarre ideas

About his employees getting to work

At nine o'clock in the morning,—

As if they were a lot of milkmen.

He has never been known to see you

When you arrive at 8:45,

But try to come in at a quarter past ten

And he will always go up in the elevator with you.

He goes to Paris on the slightest provocation

And nobody knows why he has to stay there so long.

(To this, one can only add, How different, how very different, is the style of our own dear rédacteur en chef.) Crowninshield was a stuffy man in some ways, but we owe him a debt of gratitude because it was he who kept Mrs. Parker—she married in 1917—in work, he who introduced her to Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood and caused them to become friends and colleagues, and he who had the inspired idea of giving her P. G. Wodehouse's old job as Vanity Fair's theater critic, when "Plum" took himself off to write musical comedies in collaboration with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. Mr. Benchley once observed that the joy of being a Vanity Fair contributor was this: you could write about any subject you liked, no matter how outrageous, as long as you said it in evening clothes. I have devoted my professional life to the emulation of this fine line.

I never knew Mrs. Parker, but I did know Jessica Mitford, whose life in some ways reminds me of Parker's: refugee from a perfectly ghastly family; champion of the oppressed; implacable foe of the bores. Once, during Mitford's days in the Deep South as a partisan of civil rights, "Decca" was taken to an all-white garden party by her friend Virginia Durr. Introduced to the head of the local board of education, she sweetly confided that in Oakland, California, where she lived, the student honor roll was led by blacks. "It don't seem to make no sense, do it?" said the sturdy segregationist. "To me it do," retorted Decca, sweeping away as the education boss wilted like a salted snail. The crisp one-line comeback is among the least ephemeral things in the world.

People revere and remember Mrs. Parker's work to this day, for its epigrams and multiple entendres and for its terse, brittle approach to the long littleness of life. There's a tendency to forget, though, that the "edge" and the acuity came from an acidulated approach to stupidity and bigotry and cruelty. Much of this awareness originated in her family life; as the youngest of two brothers and two sisters she was the keenest in observing the difference between their uptown life and the dismal condition of those who toiled in the apparel industry. As, in 1939, she was to tell the readers of New Masses—arguably the least brittle and witty magazine ever to be published on American soil:

I think I knew first what side I was on when I was about five years old, at which time nobody was safe from buffaloes. It was in a brownstone house in New York, and there was a blizzard, and my rich aunt—a horrible woman then and now—had come to visit. I remember going to the window and seeing the street with the men shovelling snow; their hands were purple on their shovels, and their feet were wrapped with burlap. And my aunt, looking over my shoulder, said, "Now isn't it nice there's this blizzard. All those men have work." And I knew then that it was not nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them when it was fair.

The word "fair" is beautifully deployed there, I think. Even when she was writing for New Masses (the Communist-dominated mutation of the old Greenwich Village The Masses, which had been associated with John Reed and Max Eastman), Mrs. Parker did not forsake her habit of stretching like a feline and then whipping out with a murderous paw. (Of some superior-minded socialists she used to know, she wrote: "Some of them are dead. And the rest are liberals, too.")

So that a life apparently consecrated to Broadway and the speakeasy and (oh God, not all that again) the Algonquin Hotel, with its celebrated Round Table and matching circle of wits—George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott predominating—was also a life, as she phrased it, "wild with the knowledge of injustice and brutality and misrepresentation." And in 1927 she married her two styles—deadly perfect-pitch eavesdropping and cold contempt for prejudice—in a story entitled "Arrangement in Black and White." It opens like this: "The woman with the pink velvet poppies wreathed round the assisted gold of her hair traversed the crowded room at an interesting gait combining a skip with a sidle … "

Rather like her first poem, "Any Porch," much of Mrs. Parker's story is overheard dialogue, made up of mingled inanity and condescension. The vapid woman of "assisted gold" hair is bent on meeting the "colored" singer who is the social lion of the evening. Yet she worries what her husband may think:

But I must say for Burton, he's heaps broader-minded than lots of these Southerners. He's really awfully fond of colored people. Well, he says himself, he wouldn't have white servants. And you know, he had this old colored nurse, this regular old nigger mammy, and he just simply loves her. Why, every time he goes home, he goes out in the kitchen to see her. He does, really, to this day.

There are some moments of superb dryness to offset the electrifying embarrassment, as when the woman gushingly asks her host, "Aren't I terrible?," and he replies, "Oh, no, no, no. No, no." Or when she asks:

"There are some bad white people, too, in this world. Aren't there?"

"I guess there are," said her host.

It's a fairly short story, but it seems longer—as moments of gross social bêtise always do—because the female character just cannot put a foot right. (When she eventually meets the black singer, she speaks "with great distinctness, moving her lips meticulously, as if in parlance with the deaf.") Viewed from more than seven decades later, it seems at moments a little obvious, until one remembers those seven decades and their passage, and the fact that Jim Crow—legally enforced segregation in everything from trains to the armed forces—was the unchallenged rule in 1927, and until one appreciates that Mrs. Parker had anticipated every agonized, patronizing person who was ever to speak of the African-American and his divine sense of rhythm. Indeed, she was four decades ahead of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

She was also four decades away from her own death. "But I shall stay the way I am," she wrote in 1925. "Because I do not give a damn." In consequence, partly, of her non-damn donation policy, her end wasn't as sweet as it might have been. Lonely, except for her dog, Troy, and a bit sour, and a touch too fond of the pre-noon cocktail, she hung on in the Volney residential hotel in New York—within dog-walking distance of Central Park and full of the sort of idle women she had always despised—and continued to make biting remarks to a diminishing audience. She was habitually hopeless about money, and her friends were surprised, after her demise, to find that she had bothered to make a will at all. But in 1965, feeling herself wasting away, she had summoned a lawyer named Oscar Bernstien and drawn up a very simple document. Her shares of common stock in The New Yorker (given to her by editor Harold Ross), her savings accounts, and her copyrights and royalties, she instructed him, were to go to the Reverend Martin Luther King. In the event of his death, they would be bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.). Oscar Bernstien's widow, Rebecca, later said, "He understood completely what she had in mind. It seemed natural because she had no heirs, and racial injustice had always affected her very deeply." Having made these simple provisions—and meanwhile appointing Lillian Hellman as her literary executor—she told Zero Mostel that the least she could do now was die.

But this she didn't do until June 7, 1967. The Reverend Dr. King was chairing a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in an Atlanta restaurant called B. B. Beamon's, when he received the news of the bequest. It didn't amount to all that much—$20,448.39 after deductions—but at 1967 prices it caused him to tell his executive that it "verifies what I have always said, that the Lord will provide." At that moment, he had less than a year to live himself.

Mrs. Parker had stipulated that she be cremated, with no funeral service of any kind, and she nearly got her wish. Lillian Hellman organized a memorial at which she herself was the star attraction, and seems to have lost or destroyed all of her friend's remaining papers. The cremation, though, did take place.

"Excuse my dust" had been Mrs. Parker's jokey all-purpose epitaph. But the laugh was on her. Lillian Hellman sent her ashes to the law firm of Oscar Bernstien and Paul O'Dwyer, and Mr. O'Dwyer, one of New York's greatest people's attorneys and labor defenders, receiving no instructions about their disposal or their disposition, kept them in a filing cabinet in his office for two decades. There is only one plausible explanation for this amazingly unaesthetic outcome, and that is the vindictiveness of Lillian Hellman—surely one of the least attractive women produced by the American "progressive" culture in this century. Furious at not having been named owner of the estate, she contested the transfer of the rights from Dr. King to the N.A.A.C.P. A court ruled in favor of the organization, causing Ms. Hellman to explode with irritation and to speak with almost as much condescension as the frothy lady in "Arrangement in Black and White." "It's one thing to have real feeling for black people," she expostulated, "but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the N.A.A.C.P., a group so conservative that even many blacks now don't have any respect for it, is something else." To her playwright friend Howard Teichmann, according to Marion Meade's surpassingly good Parker biography, What Fresh Hell Is This?, Hellman raged about Mrs. Parker's alleged promise that "when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing. At my death, they would pass directly to the N.A.A.C.P. But what did she do? She left them to the N.A.A.C.P. Damn her!" (To the present day, those who want to reprint Mrs. Parker have to go to the N.A.A.C.P. and discuss royalties: a perfect posthumous revenge from two points of view.)

That period of spitefulness and neglect came to its close in October 1988, when Benjamin Hooks of the N.A.A.C.P. became aware that Mrs. Parker's remains had no resting-place except for a dank filing cabinet. A small memorial garden was prepared on the grounds of the organization's national headquarters in Baltimore, and a brief ceremony was held at which Mr. Hooks improved somewhat on the terse line about "excuse my dust." It might be better, he said, to recall her lines from "Epitaph for a Darling Lady":

Leave for her a red young rose

Go your way, and save your pity.

She is happy, for she knows

That her dust is very pretty.

Mrs. Parker had never been very affirmatively Jewish—she disliked her father's piety and always insisted that her hatred of Hitler and Fascism was, so to say, secular—but Mr. Hooks took the opportunity to stress the historic comradeship between blacks and Jews. The inscription at the little memorial reads:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) Humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested "Excuse My Dust". This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind, and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people.

This rather affecting gesture drew little publicity at the time. And black-Jewish relations were not exactly flourishing in the late 1980s. A few years ago, when I was in Baltimore to visit the H. L. Mencken Library, I heard about the Parker monument and made a brief detour-cum-pilgrimage. I was sad to find the garden slightly neglected, and some of the staff unaware that it was even there. But the N.A.A.C.P. was undergoing a dismal interlude then, with its executive director, the Reverend Ben Chavis, accused of diverting its hard-won funds to pay off his mistress. (He has since changed names and identities and sought relief in the "ministry" of Louis Farrakhan.)

On my most recent visit, in June of this year, things were already looking up. I was greeted by Ms. Chris Mencken, one of the N.A.A.C.P.'s staffers, whose grandfather's second cousin was the sage of Baltimore himself. (H. L. Mencken, indeed, published several of Mrs. Parker's early stories in The Smart Set, the middlebrow-baiting review that he edited with George Jean Nathan. But that didn't prevent her, when they met in Baltimore in 1924, from walking out when he took too many drinks and began to give off slurring jokes about black people.) Ms. Mencken, whose presence seemed like a sort of ideal recompense for that spoiled evening, had just finished sweeping up around the memorial. It stands in a small grove of pines, which could be mistaken for a circle of listeners. The plaque with the above inscription sits on a cylindrical urn which contains the ashes. The whole is set in three circular courses of brown brickwork. Harry G. Robinson, then dean of the School of Architecture at Howard University, was given the commission for the memorial and wrote that it was intended to symbolize the center of a Round Table.

With America's most venerable civil-rights organization until recently facing bankruptcy and other sorts of discredit, it has been a time for volunteers. Mrs. Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of the civil-rights martyr Medgar Evers, first stepped forward to assume responsibility. So did former congressman Kweisi Mfume, and so did Julian Bond, the brilliant Georgian activist and orator who was a student of Dr. King's. As the N.A.A.C.P. itself "came back" from an interval of decline, and as Bond and others began to speak back boldly against the black separatist demagogues (and the mealymouthed senators and congressmen who would not disown the so-called Council of Conservative Citizens), I had a tiny idea. I wrote to Julian Bond, proposing that Mrs. Parker's memorial garden be refurbished and re-dedicated. (One hopes that she, who so despised the church, would "excuse" the fact that the N.A.A.C.P. building is a converted nunnery.) By this means, I thought we could do honor to one of Vanity Fair's founding minxes, and also to the brave causes that she upheld so tenaciously. Julian Bond right away agreed it was a sound scheme, so we're going to have a little party to celebrate said scheme. I would modestly propose adding a line of Mrs. Parker's from 1939, about the misery and bigotry she saw around her: "I knew it need not be so; I think I knew even then that it would eventually not be so." These are only words, and this is only a gesture, but as Mrs. Parker proved somewhat to her own surprise, there is power in words, and in gestures too.